Humanities Commons is a trusted, nonprofit network where
humanities scholars can create a professional profile, discuss common
interests, develop new publications, and share their work. The Humanities Commons network is open to anyone.Humanities Commons is a project of the office of scholarly
communication at the Modern Language Association. Its development was
generously funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Humanities Commons is based on the open-source Commons-in-a-Box project of the City University of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center and is an expansion of the MLA’s MLA Commons, which launched in January 2013. The founding partner societies of Humanities Commons are
the Association for Jewish Studies; the Association for Slavic, East
European, and Eurasian Studies; and the College Art Association. Each
society has its own Commons hub.

Humanities Commons was designed by scholarly societies in
the humanities to serve the needs of humanists as they engage in
teaching and research that benefit the larger community. Unlike other
social and academic communities, Humanities Commons is
open-access, open-source, and nonprofit. It is focused on providing a
space to discuss, share, and store cutting-edge research and innovative
pedagogy—not on generating profits from users’ intellectual and personal
data.

What Would You Like to Do?

With the increasing commercialization of Academia.edu and with the chaotic nature of institutional repositories several scholarly societies have collaborated to develop Humanities Commons. My profile is here. I have begun the process of populating it. As soon as that process is complete, I will delete my Adacemia.edu account

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.